50

I crouched in the undergrowth, watching the art deco house. Ten past eight. Fences across Sussex would be vibrating with radio waves, filling the air with German voices.

I circled round the house to the back, where a lawn ran down from the house to the woods. An ornamental monkey--puzzle tree loomed in the dusk. Beyond it, lawn chairs and croquet hoops spoke of a pleasant afternoon. A teak table overflowed with empty bottles. It looked like there was quite a house party going on.

The wise move would have been to sit and watch all night, but it was time to make something happen, wise move or not.

I ran across the lawn, making sure to avoid the croquet hoops. Coloured balls were spread across the grass, abandoned mid game.

I tried the back door.

I heard it straight away. The voice from the ether, pulled down from the airwaves by my fence. But this time I wasn’t hearing it from a fence. I could hear the man himself, -Gustav Siegfried, making his nightly report.

I was in a kitchen. It was small and ultra-modern, with formica counters and an enamelled stove. There was a humming from the corner. A purpose-built refrigerator, a compressor on top whirring away. By the stainless-steel sink, a generous collection of dirty wine glasses.

The voice was coming from deeper in the house. I heard other voices, kept deliberately low.

I stepped carefully over a bundle of wires that lay across the kitchen floor. I followed, like Jack following a strand of the beanstalk.

In the hallway, the German voice was louder, and I could see an open door ten feet away. The wires ran down the side of a shining parquet floor, across the corridor to lead through the open door. Where they crossed the floor, someone had put a rug over them. The rug was bunched up from people repeatedly scuffing it.

I’d found German spies, broadcasting openly back to the motherland, helping Hitler prepare for the upcoming invasion. I could back out of the house, retrace my steps, all the way to Uckfield where I could tell Neesham. But there was another option. Deal with it myself.

Blakeney, my old CO, would have had a pithy saying, but I didn’t need his advice. I’d go with the principle that had got me through life, through tricky situations in the trenches, in Afghanistan, and on the streets of Hong Kong. It hadn’t failed me yet.

Find your enemy. Kill your enemy.

A woman laughed and the German voice stopped. I heard the flutter of papers followed by conversation. The woman was talking in German, but it didn’t sound like it was for broadcast. She sounded relaxed, joking around with her friend or husband while they sat by the fire at the end of the day. Bad enough enemy agents were lying low in Sussex. Worse still, they were playing house in the lap of luxury.

As I approached the open door, the German broadcaster restarted, but this time in a heavily accented English:

‘It’s come to my attention that there are a great many English listeners tuning into my evening reports. To you all I say a hearty welcome, pip pip and all that.’

Again, the woman laughed.

‘I invite you all to lay down your arms as soon as your German brethren arrive on your shores. It will go easier that way. Well, easier for us, that’s for sure. But seriously, you know that most of our soldiers are young men, most of them just out of school with not much military training. We’ve grown our army so quickly, you see, that we couldn’t waste too much time with the niceties of training. I just spoke to a brave young soldier, Leutnant Sami Werner. He says he hopes he doesn’t come across too many Tommies, because he’s only been given three bullets. Seems the fat cats in Berlin have been keeping a lot of the so-called investment our glorious Führer has made in our armed forces for themselves.’

I’d heard enough.

Find your enemy. Kill your enemy.